Jumat, 29 April 2011

Frank Tashlin - Who's Minding the Store? (1963)

Synopsis: [taken from imdb]Barbara is a very rich girl who falls in love with Norman Phiffier, a poor young man. She doesn't tell him who she really is and prepares to marry him. But, Mrs. Tuttle (Barbara's mother) doesn't want her daughter to mary such a poor man. So, she hires Norman at one of her big stores, and gives him the most difficult and disgusting works. She hopes that seeing Norman humiliated, Barbara will finally leave him. But things don't work exactly this way...

Excerpt from Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time-Image (The Athlone Press, 1989, pp. 65-66)Jerry Lewis’s character, more involuted than infantile, is such that everything resonates in his head and soul; but, conversely, his smallest sketched or inhibited gestures, and the inarticulate sounds he comes out with, in turn resonate, because they set off a movement of world which goes as far as catastrophe (the destruction of the set at the music professor’s in The Patsy), or which travels from one world to another, in a pulverizing of colours, a metamorphosis of forms and a mutation of sounds (The Nutty Professor). Lewis takes up a classic figure of American cinema, that of the Loser, of the born loser, whose definition is: he ‘goes too far’. But it is precisely in the burlesque dimension that this ‘too far’ becomes movement of world which saves him and will make him a winner. His body is shaken by spasms and various currents, successive waves, as when he is going to throw the dice (Hollywood or Bust). This is no longer the age of the tool or machine, as they appear in the earlier stages, notably in the machine, of Keaton that we have described. This is a new age of electronics, and the remote controlled object which substitutes optical and sound signs for sensory-motor ones. It is no longer the machine that goes wrong and goes mad, like the feeding-machine in Modern Times, it is the cold rationality of the autonomous technical object which reacts on the situation and ravages the set: not just the electronic house and the lawn-mowers in It’s Only Money, but the caddies who destroy the self-service (The Disorderly Orderly) and the Hoover that devours everything in the shop, goods, clothes, customers and wallpaper (Who’s Minding the Store).